Further proof that I’m not that smart
Tonight I spent about 40 minutes trying to adjust these sprinklers. No matter how I set them, the head wouldn’t fully rotate. And yes, I tried “lifting the lever” as specified. Then I settled for letting it water an area, then picking it up and sticking it in the ground in a new position. I did this twice before it settled upon me how truly stupid doing that made me feel. Then I said, “Fuck it,” lit a cigar and took the dog for a walk.
Then I came back and did it all over again.
Then I turned it off and went inside and had a drink and told myself I’d fix this in the morning when at least it would be light outside. I refuse to be defeated.
It’s daily tribulations like this that keep me modest. That, and about a hundred other things.
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Now playing: The Beach Boys – With Me Tonight
via FoxyTunes
August 14th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
When I bought a new sprinkler this past spring I looked at “new & improved” ones with settings to do a thousand and one things. I looked at the “old” style sprinklers that just spun around and the ones that swung back and forth. I decided on the old spinning around sprinkler and let others fight with how to set the sprinkler to water the lawn, walk the dog, and wash the car.
Paul
August 15th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
“It’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse…
No, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies…”
That’s from the poem ‘The Shoelace’, by Charles Bukowski. It appears in “Mockingbird Wish Me Luck” (1972).
We’ve all had those incidents, like Bukowski’s broken shoelace, that accumulate and eventually send us over the edge. Unmanagable lawn sprinklers are on the list between dripping faucets and flickering neon tubes.
August 15th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
The flickering fluorescent tubes I can handle — you switch out the ballast.
Flickering neon tubes you take to a neon shop because there’s deadly gas inside.
For dripping faucets, you replace the washer; if that doesn’t work, you call Mighty Mike the Plumber, who lives conveniently across the street from us. (At least, that’s what we do.)
The sprinklers, however, remain imponderable.
No, these sprinklers are a soul killer.
November 24th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
[…] range. Since then, we’ve alternated between using either the sprinkler-hose-attachment system characterized here as utterly baffling me, and just saying the hell with it and watching the grass wither and die. […]